The authorities should learn from their failure in protecting industrial estates like Nava Nakorn and Bang Kadi and dispatch a team of experts and soldiers to save industrial parks like Lat Krabang from getting submerged in the days to come.

Nava Nakorn and Bang Kadi industrial estates in Pathum Thani province ended up getting submerged because the authorities, both at the estate and government levels, were disorganised, complacent, lacked knowledge about the power of the floods and over estimated the strength and reliability of flood barriers. Both the estates, now left dealing with huge damages, had refused to launch any coordinated efforts to enlist help from volunteers and told this writer just hours before the flood barriers were breached that they were okay and would be able to keep the water at bay.

On Thursday, a contributor to the prachatai.com online newspaper, who reportedly lives in the Nava Nakorn estate, wrote that infighting, complacency and the lack of preparation by the estates' management were the main reasons for the failure to defend Nava Nakorn. The contributor added that though soldiers were there, the officer in charge did not have the power to make any important decisions on his own.

Now, in order to avoid a repeat of past mistakes, the government should dispatch a competent team of experts to all industrial estates at risk. The team should include people who know about the force of water, so that they can make the best estimate of the magnitude, power and flow of water expected to hit each estate on the flood path. The team should also include dambuilding experts so they can assess the strength of existing flood barriers and how they can be effectively reinforced, and at least one well educated middle-ranking Army officer who can make decisions about the manpower on the ground. In addition, each industrial estate should enlist manpower from other factories not at risk.

Repeating what the authorities did, or did not do, in Ayutthaya and Pathum Thani would be like taking more of the same wrong medicine.